David Bowie: the painter, and other artists on his site

as always, he needs Eno. ;-)

what a load of crap.

not just bowie's stuff.

celebrity knitting would be no worse than this

'It's not really neo-expressionism, it's just the power to charm'.

I met top dealer Jay Jopling at a party in Paris once and he told me that Bowie had come to White Cube to beg for an exhibition, to no avail. 'Elton John knows a fuck of a lot more about art than David Bowie does,' he said.

(That said, if I had to choose between Jay, Elton and David to be stuck in a meaningless universe characterised by nameless anxiety with, I'd choose David.)

They're certainly derivative, but I don't think they're that bad. Certainly no worse than the Lady Di painted by a stripper that Saatchi bought the other day. Although if I were Bowie I'd have left them under the bed.

Joplin wrong about Bowie's supposed art ignorance. Bowie might have conservative, anachronistic ideas about what kind of art he wants to produce, but he's an avid and serious reader of art theory. I only know this because a friend pointed out to me that his favourite book a few years ago was "Art Has No History". (I wrote one of the essays in it, so my teenage dreams of meeting Bowie as an equal finally paid off. Although I haven't exactly met him... yet...)

Apart from the fact that he's the person I thought I was for a number of years, the sum total of my actual contact with David Bowie was in one of the online chats he has with fans on his website. I asked a question about why he wrote for Modern Painters when Frieze was a much more trendy magazine. He responded with something about being a painter himself and liking painting.

Later, somewhat surprisingly, Modern Painters ran a four page interview with me. David Bowie (who sits on their board) came up. I said 'I'm a disciple of David Bowie only in the sense that he was very promiscuous, jumping from dance to performance art to theatre to rock music. I thought if you were spending too much time in record bins you should stick on a leotard and do mime. That would be really healthy.'

Over the years I've been disappointed at how few of his promised extra-curricular dabblings have actually come to fruition. That book of short stories he promised in about 1980 while wearing a red tie and being interviewed on some late night news show on BBC 2. That film he told Jules Holland he was directing in about 1987. The Ziggy opera he cited as the reason he was using lawyers to block my friends Iain and Jane's Ziggy reconstruction art performance in Amsterdam. At least he has made his art career public, even if his best painting remains that 1978 canvas of a little boy on a Berlin staircase, and the whole thing looks a bit... well, scrappy.

Even with its amateur quality, it would still be really great to have one of those original dhead paintings hanging on one of my walls. $3938 is a lot for that though. I still like the cover of Outside a lot, and a lot of the most recent cyber album designs (but how much did Bowie really put into those) I also like the idea of displaying a bunch of other artist's works even if they aren't too great either.